


The Road to Islamabad

by LyraNgalia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Coda, Episode: s02e01 A Scandal in Belgravia, F/M, Islamabad, Karachi, Missing Scene, Post-A Scandal in Belgravia, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:00:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1364932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/pseuds/LyraNgalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>It would take Sherlock Holmes to fool me, and I don’t think he was on hand, do you?</i> </p><p>Sherlock Holmes may have crossed oceans and countries to save Irene Adler's life in Karachi, but the real truth, the real journey, rested in what happened as they made their way across Pakistan, that culminated in what came to pass between the Consulting Detective and the Woman in Islamabad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to my dear friend [BlueKiwi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueKiwi/pseuds/BlueKiwi), who put up with my whining and beta'ed this monster for me, who did not throw things at me despite my inability to pick a tense and stick with it, and who is one of the most talented writers I know. My writing is better for having known her. 
> 
> _And as for Irene Adler? Well you say he was beaten by her but do you know what they got up to in Islamabad because I do._ \- Benedict Cumberbatch

**Karachi, Pakistan**

The man who smelled strongly of goat gestured impatiently for her phone, his other hand clenching his assault rifle in tense anticipation. Irene ignored him, and he spat an insult in Urdu that she also ignored as she typed on her phone. As far as Irene was concerned, the worst the militants would do was already at hand, and a few more seconds to send her last words into the void was a luxury they could afford her.

She felt numb as the words appeared on the screen, and she sent them to a familiar recipient. She'd never get an answer, but then she never had before, except once. But there was a chance that he, of all people, would understand what it meant. With the spectre of death at her shoulder, Irene found herself thinking that it _was_ terribly sentimental, to find some small comfort in the hope that the one person most like herself in the world might at least understand the message, might realize that there was one less person uniquely like him in all the world.

 

“Goodbye, Mr Holmes.”

 

She handed the goat-scented idiot her phone and sighed silently. There was nothing left. She'd run, had fled and tried to disappear, but Jim Moriarty had been out for blood, and despite her best attempts, her calling in of favours, without the information on her camera-phone, attempts at bargains had fallen on deaf ears. Irene took another breath, ignoring the scent of goat and dirt and sweat and blood, ignoring the bite of sand beneath her knees, and kept her head high, her back straight, as she closed her eyes.

She'd begged once. She wouldn't do it again. Not now. She could only take comfort in the fact that the blow would likely be qui--

A familiar, breathless moan. The last time she'd heard it had been in the Battersea Power Station.

Her eyes flew open, and she half-turned towards her executioner. For a moment, Irene thought she had imagined it, that in some fit of desperation, her mind had conjured up an illusion, a hallucination to ease her passing. But no, she would recognize the eyes staring down at her anywhere.

“When I say run, run.”

 

_Pulse. Elevated. Your pupils dilated._

 

Hope, bright and wild and utterly unexpected, bloomed bright and for a moment Irene found it hard to breathe as Sherlock Holmes spun away, the blade that moments ago had been her death sentence gleaming in the artificial light as he swung them towards the unaware militants.

But the breathlessness, the surprise, only lasted a moment, as the man who had taken her phone shouted, raising his rifle. Irene moved then, balling her fists together and delivering a precise blow to his groin. He doubled over instinctively, and she rose to her feet, wrenching the assault rifle from his grasp. A second blow, this time with the butt of the rifle, and he collapsed, senseless. It would be enough to put him out for a while, though Irene has already made a mental note to finish him off once their safety was certain.

It had taken the militants mere moments to realize that something had gone wrong when their supposed executioner turned his blade against his own, and the fight pressed in close. There was no space to aim the rifle properly, so Irene swung it like a club, careful to keep her limbs and her aim away from Sherlock's swinging blade as their enemies pressed in around them.

“The cameraman!” he said with a grunt of effort as the sword clove through one man's shoulder, eliciting a scream as metal blade met bone.

She ducked, as the man with suddenly one less arm lurched towards her, and brought the rifle up to her shoulder. In the frenzy, bracing and sighting properly was a lost cause, and Irene simply aimed as best she could towards the fleeing cameraman and squeezed the trigger, expecting the sheer number of bullets the automatic weapon could fire to compensate for her lack of aim. She waited long enough to see the cameraman lurch in surprise as his legs went out from under him, and rose again, just in time to see another man, his robes torn and bloodied, pull a heavy pistol from the folds of his robes and aim for Sherlock.

“Get down!” she snapped as she raised the rifle again. She felt more than saw the thud, the stir of air as he obeyed, dropping to the ground as the man with the pistol raised his hand. They were too close, and instead of aiming and firing, Irene simply raised the rifle and swung it towards the pistol-wielding militant's head, feeling a satisfying, sickening crunch as she connected.

How long the fight lasted, she'd never know. For a seeming instant and eternity, her focus remained intent on nothing but staying alive to draw another breath. Later, when adrenaline ebbed, Irene would marvel at how insidious hope could be, how a single second, the time it took to recognize a breathless moan from a mobile phone, could undo days upon days of hard-won resignation.

But eventually, a middle-aged man, his knuckles heavy with scar tissue, fell to the ground in front of her, and Irene stepped back to avoid his fall, the move bringing her up hard against Sherlock Holmes as he avoided his own opponent.

She whirled in response as he did the same, and for a long moment there was no sound but their mutual laboured breathing, and the thud of her own heartbeat loud in Irene's ears.

Only then did Irene notice that the entire terrorist cell lay dead, dying, or unconscious on the ground, and that blood trickled slowly from the temple of the last man that had fallen to the butt of the rifle. Hope and adrenaline coursed through her veins like some feverish drug cocktail, and the sudden still silence of the desert night pounded in her ears. Irene opened her mouth to speak and found herself for once without words on her tongue, without exactly what she needed to say to get what she wanted.

After all, wasn't _this_ , wasn't _life_ exactly what she wanted?

For one of a handful of times in her life, Irene Adler did not know what to say, so she did the only thing she could think of. She took the single half step between herself and Sherlock Holmes, and kissed him.

She felt him go rigid with shock for a heartbeat before his arm wrapped around her waist, and tasted blood and the bitter bite of nicotine on his tongue. There was no calculation, not for this moment, simply feverish touch and an utterly human, hopelessly sentimental need to _connect_ , to ensure this wasn't some hallucination of a desperate mind. And it was solid and real and she felt the rough grit of his disguise, the days’ worth of untidy stubble on his jaw, the warmth of a hand against her back, the hilt of a sword crushed between them and jabbing her in the ribs. No near-death delusion would give her all those things, all the tiny irritations of life.

She pulled away before he did, her eyes wide and fever bright. Their mutual breathing thudded loud in her ears, and his eyes were dark, ringed by pale colour, near hers. A too-loud heartbeat, and as if with mutual consent, they stepped away from each other. His jaw worked, she saw him swallow once, twice, until finally he spoke, “The keys are still in the jeep.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Twenty-nine kilometers northeast of Karachi, Pakistan**

The desert night's silence was almost palpable as the jeep rumbled along the uneven desert road. The sun had long set, and any radiant heat captured by the expanse of sand had long since escaped into the open sky, leaving the air chill beneath the clear dark night. She drove in silence, an assault rifle balanced across her knees, following the road, occasionally turning off the headlights and veering off the road and into the sand if a car seemed to be on the horizon.

“You didn't run,” he finally said from the passenger seat, rousing himself out of his thoughts, his voice seemingly overloud in the quiet of the desert night, echoing over the rumble of the stolen jeep. “I told you to run.”

She risked taking her eye off the road long enough to give him a sidelong look and an unrepentant smirk. “Did you really expect I'd take direction well?” 'If at all' hung unspoken in the air between them, and Irene returned her attention to the road. She swerved carefully around a particularly deep pothole in the road, and for a moment her entire attention appeared taken up by driving. Until, moments later, she added. “Besides, if I had run, the idiot with the pistol would have shot you in the back.”

He snorted in disdainful skepticism, and his eyes remained fixed ahead, as he stared off into the middle distance, his long fingers steepled against his lips. “Hardly. He was myopic. He'd likely have missed.”

She rolled her eyes and ignored the adrenaline singing in her veins as the miles ticked by. Another three miles, and Irene shook herself, feeling the monotonous tedium of the road lulling her to complacency. “How did you know I was in Karachi?” She told herself she asked simply to have something new to do, to keep focused.

He, predictably, did not answer, and Irene's attention remained on the road as he glanced over at her, his eyes seeming to linger on the lines of her profile in the desert moonlight. Eventually, he spoke again, irritated and peremptory. “Pull over. You'll run us off the road in your state. I'll drive.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Outside Hyderabad, Pakistan**

It was near midnight when they approached the outskirts of Hyderabad, and as buildings began to appear along the road with greater and greater frequency, Irene felt tension coil again at the base of her spine, her hand clenching tighter on the steering wheel. Despite the late hour and the fact that other vehicles had long stopped appearing in their rear view mirror, Irene found herself checking said mirror with more frequency, glancing about for any movement beside their own. In the passenger seat, her companion remained as immovable and silent as he had been since she refused to hand over the wheel at his demand, though she noticed that he too glanced about with greater frequency, that he held himself with the same coiled tension.

“There, up ahead, turn left,” he finally said, breaking the silence as they passed a darkened petrol station.

The left turn he'd indicated was dark, turning off into an area seemingly uninhabited by anyone or anything save a stray goat. She slowed the jeep long enough to frown at him. “Why? I know a place to stay in the city.”

“They found you because they had eyes in the places you'd been, Woman,” he retorted, “We need to get someplace without prying eyes, and by that definition some place you don't know.”

Her frown deepened, more out of irritation than anything, for the fact that she could not, at the moment, counter that particular argument. And so she turned left, following the road he'd indicated, until they came to a darkened cottage (hovel, really), with a smattering of sleeping goats and chickens in the near distance. He gestured towards the back of the cottage, and as Irene parked the jeep behind the featureless sun-baked clay wall and the night fell silent around them again, she shook her head, glancing over at him in the sudden dark. “Even you can't tell me you deduced that this was here from the turn in the road.”

In the scarce light, she did not see the smirk on his lips, though the self-satisfaction in his tone was obvious. “Of course not. I deduced this was here from the dead cameraman,” he answered as he swung out of the jeep with a crunch of gravel. “Callouses on his index fingers, recent farmer, obvious. His accent, southern not northern.” He has already turned away from the vehicle and headed for the door of the shack.

Irene waited for another moment, watching and listening to the quiet of the desert night, before climbing out of the jeep. She winced as she did, the motion pulling at stiffened muscles and what she was starting to suspect was a cracked rib, but she was steady on her feet, and he was too focused on picking the simple lock on the door to notice. “And once you had narrowed it down to Hyderabad you were able to get the answer from him,” she completed for him as she approached. “That does beg the question of just how long you were with that cell, Mr. Holmes.”

The rusty lock gave with a grunt of effort and a squeak of metal and he rose from his crouch to shoulder open the rough wooden door. She caught a brief flash of a fierce grin of satisfaction before he turned his face away again. “Long enough,” was his only answer as he stepped into the darker confines of the cottage.

It was an answer that both told her everything she needed to know and nothing at all, a thought which brought a faint smile to Irene's lips as she stood outside, watchful. The night was silent, except for the occasional chuff from a sleeping goat, and the faint shuffle of footsteps inside the dead cameraman's home. “Standing out there is hardly conducive to being in hiding,” came his voice from within, confident and presumptuous, along with the sound of a metallic clang. “But if you insist, close the door. I need light.”

A look of instinctive irritation crossed Irene's face at his off-handed presumption, but it was fleeting, serving simply as another reminder that this was very much real, that if she were hallucinating her mind would flatter her. Despite her skill and intellectual prowess, even her mind could not have conjured up quite that exact thoughtless arrogance that Sherlock Holmes wore as easily as his greatcoat.

So she stepped into the small cottage, slipping the jeep keys into her pocket and pulling the door closed behind her. She was enveloped in unbroken ink black darkness for a mere second, but before panic and the reminder of her capture in Karachi could sink in, a light began to grow slowly, cool and white. A small, portable camping lamp, its bulb a relatively weak collection of LEDs. The radius at which it threw its light was narrow, but it was enough to make out shapes in the single room: the lines of a narrow bed against the far wall, the lumpy, uneven shape of a small stove and a small sack of coal to feed it, the long lean lines of Sherlock Holmes beneath the disguise he wore as he hunched over said stove.

"Not concerned with the neighbors noticing a strange car outside?" she asked, skirting along the edge of the single room. She came to a deep chest at the foot of the bed and raised its lid, ignoring the strike of matches from behind her as he lit the stove. The wood was heavy, well-worn, beneath her fingertips. Even in the dim light, she could tell the piece was out of place in the small hovel, something beautiful and old. An heirloom, possibly.

He scoffed, and she caught the scent of sulfur from the snuffed match as a second source of light, warmer and dimmer, added to the illumination, and she half-turned towards him. "What neighbors, Woman? The owner of this house was a repressed farmer with a penchant for violence turned terrorist. He'd have warned off any neighbors who tried to involve themselves in his affairs long ago, and any who are still curious will assume he's back from his dealings for a respite and ignore the car." Though his tone was dismissive, sneering, in the low light, it was obvious, at least to her, that he was pleased by the fact, by the forethought that had gone into bringing them here.

She turned her attention back to the chest, lifting the heavy lid. The interior was too dark to see in the dim light, so she stepped over to the electric lamp and took it up, raising it over the chest to look inside, careful not to raise it too high lest light escape the shuttered windows. "Now I suppose you'll tell me what I'm looking for," she said wryly, hiding a wince as she leaned in to shift through the belongings in the chest.

"Food. Weapons. Valuables," came the prompt answer. There was the soft thud of charcoal as he added fuel to the fire in the small stove. "I wouldn't bother with the former. Doubt there's anything here worth eating. He hasn't been back in months. Obvious from the goat."

Irene ignored his answer, and continued sifting through the dead man's belongings. The idea of food in the chest was patently ridiculous, but the latter two were good suggestions (though there was little more than an old, well-used knife to qualify as either). She did, however, find a battered metal box, its white paint chipped but the bold crescent outline still visible on its front. She didn't pick it up, lest the noise give away what she'd found, and instead simply shifted it among the rest of the chest's contents (a few sets of clothes, worn but well mended, a heavy book, some assorted trinkets that the dim light did not allow her to examine too thoroughly), judging the metal box to be full simply by the weight as she moved it.

“Is the goat obvious about where our dead cameraman found his water?” she asked instead, settling back on her heels and setting the small light back onto the ground where it had rested. “We might be able to go without food, but I doubt we can go far without water. Five days, I think?”

He sighed, but without a scoff, perhaps because he knew she was right, that they did need water. “In your state? I'd say three,” he answered irritably, rising from his position in front of the charcoal stove and picking up the lamp from where she'd set it. As he moved, she saw the pail, carefully maintained by its rust-free condition, sitting by the door. “Mind the fire. There's a pump outside.”

She bit back an irritable response and nodded curtly, waiting until he was out the door before she reached back into the chest, lifting out the first aid kit she'd found earlier. It took two tries to force the rusty hinges open, but in the dim glow of the stove, she could tell it was still well-stocked, with gauze and sealed pads soaked in isopropyl alcohol and ointments and even a small kit for stitches among other things, everything a farmer would have needed to take care of incidents, and perhaps a little more. She tilted her head, hearing footsteps faintly, and the squeak of metal; she'd have preferred if he'd left the lamp in the one-room cottage, but he no doubt would have recognized something if she'd asked for it.

Judging that she would only have a few minutes, Irene quickly shed her disguise, swallowing back a gasp as pulling the robe over her head aggravated her wounds. She knew exactly where the most pressing of the wounds were, a long line along her right side, across her rib cage. A mostly superficial knife wound, sustained after her capture, during her second escape attempt, but one that had been left untreated. The terrorist cell, after all, saw no reason to treat a woman they planned on executing. The blouse she'd worn beneath the robes was the same one she'd sustained the wound in, and Irene carefully shed it too, her fingers carefully probing to ensure none of the cut edges were caught in the wound. The skin around the cut was hot, tender, the beginnings of an infection, no doubt.

She tore one of the sealed packets of antiseptic wipes open with her teeth, and operating with little more than the dim red glow of the charcoal stove to see by, she began cleaning the wound. It was painfully slow going, navigating almost entirely by touch and her only real certainty of having been successful was the telltale sting of alcohol against raw flesh. Her awareness of the squeak of the metal pump, of the footsteps outside, all faded as her focus narrowed to the task at hand, to the bite of antiseptic, the tender heat of unhealthy flesh.

“Contamination from your hands negate any sort of antiseptic properties those wipes have.” His voice was a surprise, given that she had not even heard him return, had not even heard the door swing open again, and she jerked before she could catch herself. She turned, just in time to see him shut the door, the pail sloshing as he did so and the lamplight reflecting off the water within. “And sloppy. I could have been a surviving member of his cell or an over-inquisitive neighbor. I've expended too many resources for you to die of your own carelessness, Woman.”

He spoke as he moved, setting the pail of water and the lamp beside the charcoal stove before picking up a kettle, and Irene reached over to pull the lamp closer as she continued what he had interrupted, namely the continued treatment of her wound. It _was_ easier, with the additional light, but she was also more aware than she had been before, of the ripped strap to her brassiere, the bruises and healing scrapes that the robes had hidden, even the ribs clearly visible that spoke of weight lost in a few short months. Things that Irene Adler nude in a luxury flat in Belgravia would never have given away, but which were now starkly displayed on her skin.

“It does beg the question why you chose to expend those resources, Mr. Holmes,” she answered. Despite her obvious preoccupation with wiping away the dry blood (now that she could see it) and cleaning up the raw edges of the wound, there was no such preoccupation in her voice. She spoke as she always had with him, her attention focused like a laser on the conversation at hand.

"Wound's a couple days old," he said, changing the subject abruptly. "Not too deep, the way you still move. Favouring your other side says pain, tenderness. Bleeding's mostly stopped, but uncared for. You didn't expect it to need treatment."

She kept her attention pointedly away from him at his litany. She refused to tell him he was _right_ , to acknowledge the fact that she had expected death, had given up hope. To have given up was one thing, but to admit it was to lose, in her mind. Irene examined the sterile wipe in the lamplight and tossed it aside, opening another one to finish cleaning the wound. "Rather inefficient, from the cell's perspective," she answered, an edge to her voice, "To waste treatment and first aid on a body they can't ransom."

A ransom that would not be paid on one Irene Adler, former dominatrix, current fugitive, her connections to power gone with no secrets to buy her way to freedom. Behind her, she heard the gurgle of water as it was poured into the kettle, ignored the splash of a stray drop against her leg.

"You knew the risks when you called Moriarty." The kettle clanged against the charcoal stove, and there was the solid, soft thuds of charcoal being fed into said stove, with perhaps more force than strictly necessary. Another splash of water, and brisk rubbing hands. She expected he was washing coal dust off his fingers. "You knew playing could lose you the game." The smirk in his voice was so obvious as to be palpable. " _Did_ lose you the game."

She said nothing, again focusing her attention back to the need at hand, dabbing at the last inch of irritated, unhealed skin. She tossed the wipe aside and began applying the ointment she found within the first aid kit. She couldn't read the label, but it smelled properly medicinal, and really she doubted there was anything in there that could do her more harm. She kept her focus on the task at hand, and ignored the peripheral knowledge that he had gone silent, that the sounds of clanking and general shifting that indicated his physical motions had stopped.

It wasn't until she felt the cool fingertips against her skin, in striking contrast against the warm tender flesh, that she realized he had drawn close, and once that knowledge came to mind she wondered how she could have missed the obvious radiant body heat in the inches of space between them. But the answer to that, too, was obvious. Not missed. Ignored. She paused in the process of smoothing ointment over the cut, and his hands moved when hers stopped, pressing the raw edges of the wound close and smoothing a butterfly closure from the kit across.

She tensed, a sharp exhale escaping her before she could control it and a second later found her words. “Did I? I told you once, Mr. Holmes, I like to know people will be on my side exactly when I need them to be.”

His hands stilled immediately at her words, the touch of his fingertips against the wound lingering for no more than a second before drawing away again, taking with it the sensation of radiant body heat that kept him close. Her own hands moved, finishing applying the ointment before she picked up another of the closures to finish what he had started. The air in the small cottage began to stir again, as he rose and moved about. “Water should be safe to drink once it's boiled,” he said flatly. She nodded and began thinking of how she'd make for the main road again come daylight. She doubted he'd still be there when she woke.


	4. Chapter 4

**One hundred fifty-three kilometers south of Bahawalpur, Pakistan**

By unspoken agreement, they'd kept to traveling at night. The desert was cooler, and the roads less frequented, less likely for them to be seen or remembered. It slowed them somewhat, in the stretches between cities, as the jeep's headlights never penetrated far enough into the road ahead to be certain that road obstructions or stray animals wouldn't be ahead.

He had still been there, when she'd woken, the late afternoon light slanting through the cracks in the abandoned farmhouse in Hyderabad, illuminating the half-empty kettle, the half a pail of stagnant water. The medical kit had been packed away, and the wrappers, the bloodied sterile wipes, had been gone. Stuffed into the charcoal stove, the traces of her blood reduced to ash. He'd sat across from the narrow bed, his back against the wall, his eyes closed and his posture and breathing indicating a light doze.

She had hidden her surprise and, at the first stir she made sitting up, his eyes had flown open, and he rose immediately, as if to wipe away the fact that he had been still at all. As if he had not rested, and had been utterly restless while she'd been dead to the world.

And so they continued on the road, making their sure way north east, towards Islamabad. She hadn't needed to ask where they were going – that had been obvious from the beginning. Karachi was too dangerous, too close, too obvious to fly out of. If she had made her own escape plan, Islamabad was where she would have headed.

She sat in the passenger's seat now, the terrorists' assault rifle tucked out of sight at her feet, as the kilometers rolled past. His eyes remained on the road as he drove, occasionally swerving around a pothole or, once, some farmer's suicidal goat who simply stared at the jeep's oncoming headlights with wide empty eyes. They spoke rarely, much as they had on the road from Karachi, but that had been a different silence, one brittle with weariness and adrenaline. This felt more stoic, less fragile.

But eventually, she spoke first. “Too dangerous to stop for petrol in Bahawalpur?”

A scoff, and a glance at the dashboard, as though he had not looked only one hundred and twenty-seven seconds ago. “Too dangerous not to. We'd be too memorable stopping anywhere after Bahawalpur, and we can't make it much further beyond without it.”

At the edge of his peripheral vision, he saw her nod, then turn her head, the scarf she'd donned again slipping down with the motion to uncover her hair, drawn back in a utilitarian braid. “You'd planned for this.”

The answer was obvious, but to admit it was to give something away, in his mind, and so he didn't answer. Still, another question, another mystery that he had been working on ever since they'd escaped Karachi, rose again to the forefront of his mind. “In Karachi, why did you text me?”

There was a significance to that, one that he hadn't been able to work out. Yet.

She did not answer, but then he supposed he hadn't expected her to, and he drove on in silence, towards the dim glow in the desert night that was Bahawalpur.


	5. Chapter 5

**Bahawalpur, Pakistan**

Sherlock cursed mentally as the precise, controlled sound of gunfire rained down. He had expected leaving Pakistan was going to be problematic, but he had planned for trouble in Karachi following them out (hence the day hidden in Hyderabad) and to a certain extent trouble with government and customs officials in Islamabad. He had not planned on a lorry full of officers recognizing the militants' stolen jeep at a petrol filling station in Bahawalpur opening fire.

"Do they realize what they are surrounded by?" Irene asked, pressing herself against the side of the jeep to provide as small a target as possible. She risked rising just enough to peer over the top edge and winced as one of the shots impinged on the jeep. "I suppose they don't care is the larger issue. Three of them."

He did not bother trying to look over their temporary barricade, instead keeping crouched down, legs and lower body marginally hidden by the jeep tires. His eyes remained firmly closed, and his lips moved slightly at the barrage of gunshots. Whatever he was listening for clearly came to pass when he opened his eyes again and shook his head. "The gunman's military. It's obvious from his firing. Clustered shots. Trained, precise. Only one shooting, means he doesn't trust the other two. Local police, I expect. Might be militia but I doubt it." He gave her a nod, pulling the dark scarf back over his head. "Cover your hair, Woman, and give me the rifle. If we take out the gunner then there'll be time to make a break for the buildings. Lose them in the alleys."

She frowned, glanced back towards the alleyways in question, and shook her head decisively. "I can make the shot," she said, hefting said rifle. Still, she did take a moment to pull the scarf back over her head, obscuring the telltale braid and any other features that would have marked her as female or foreign, at least from the back. "I'll head towards areas I know," she reminded him. "I thought the point was to stay hidden from where Moriarty's eyes would be."

He returned her frown with one of his own, seconds (and three bullets) ticking by as he considered it. The precise shots, three per attempt; if the magazine were anything similar to the one they'd liberated from the terrorists, there'd be four more attempts before the man would have to reload. He nodded curtly. “Aim to incapacitate, not to kill,” he instructed, leg muscles tensing as he prepared to run. “Best if they can convince others that the cell is alive.”

Her lips thinned, pressed together in annoyance, before another burst of three bullets, and she gave a single curt nod. She didn't bother waiting to see if he'd run, instead hoisting the rifle to her shoulder. The military training of the shooter worked to her advantage, now that she realized what it meant, she exploited the training, the seconds between a burst of gunfire and the next. She raised herself just far enough over the hood of the jeep to fire, squeezing off five rounds before ducking behind the relative safety of the vehicle again. That was returned by another burst of three, the momentary pause. Another five, this time better aimed.

Four in, and she was rewarded by a grunt, and a jerky sound of a single round. A smile bloomed on Irene's face, sharp as a sickle or a strand of razor wire, and she rose, hefting the rifle over her shoulder. And just as she did, he rose as well, gesturing towards the alley before them. There was a shout as their less-trained pursuers realized that their comrade was hurt, and the two of them raced off into the shadows.

The alley was unexpectedly warm after the open desert night, full of heat radiating from sun-baked buildings, and it gave their escape a stifling quality as Irene darted into the obscuring shadow. In the relative dark, it was difficult to see ahead, but between motion of dark robes and the sound of footsteps, Irene kept up until her eyes adjusted fully. There was a shout from behind, and she quickened her footsteps, ignoring how the motion caught at the injury at her side.

“This way,” he grunted suddenly, his hand shooting out to grab her wrist, pulling her with him as he turned into a secondary alley on their left.

The unexpected pull unbalanced her, and his grip on her wrist tightened as she regained her equilibrium. She looked up, in that moment, and caught a glimpse of an external staircase, an older building with a traditional external stair to the roof. The upper windows were dark. The inhabitants either asleep or nonexistent. Without a word, she jerked back, expecting him to follow, as she headed for the stairs.

There was a moment of hesitation, of resistance, before he saw what she'd seen and followed, racing up the baked brick steps as the sound of pursuit grew steadily louder.

Unfortunately, the building's traditional exterior came with at least one adherent to the tradition of sleeping out in the cool desert air, and Irene stopped short as they reached the top of the stairs at the appearance of the sleeping man on the other side of the roof. He nearly ran into her at the sudden stop, but caught himself. Three loud heartbeats, her own like thunder in her ears, but the noise of their ascent didn't wake the man, and Irene relaxed marginally, stepping onto the roof itself with deliberately soft steps.

Sherlock followed, moving in tandem with her, minimizing the disturbance they could cause. "Deaf in one ear," he said quietly, his voice pitched low as he nodded to the sleeping man in question.

His pronouncement, full of that irritable confidence, made her look twice at the man in question, at the way he lay, sleeping on his side. "The way he bunches his pillow beneath one ear, as if he's blocking out noise, but the other is open to the air. He doesn't need to block out noise there because he can't hear a thing," she observed, a note of self-satisfaction creeping into her voice.

He gave her a sidelong look, surprised, then pleased, then forced back to cool neutrality. It was hardly appropriate, at this point, but warm pleasure crept up her spine at that look, at the knowledge that she could still play his game. "And the tan. Barely noticeable in the dark, but darker tan on one side, as if he's used to tilting his head to hear," he added smugly, nodding towards the edge of the roof farthest from the sleeping man, closest to the alleyway they'd come. "They'll be trying to follow us."

She nodded, crouching against the low wall that rimmed the roof. "Expect they'll head straight," she murmured, gesturing to the alley they'd abruptly turned away from. Despite the man's deafness, she kept her voice low, the words barely caught even between them. "We can double back, take their vehicle, or one of the others at the petrol station, leave the jeep here."

A chuckle, and she felt more than saw his nod of agreement. "Moriarty's network will see the jeep and assume the cell's still here, they won't look too deep into your execution," he said, then held still as their pursuers moved below. Despite her attempt to remain in control, Irene caught herself holding her breath as the shadowed shapes, the two still-able bodied officers rather than the injured former military man, came into view, hesitated at the turn in the alley, and continued on as she'd expected.

She counted the seconds, balanced between wanting to gain maximum distance from their pursuers and to minimize the likelihood of their doubling back. When she judged a near minute had gone by, Irene rose to her feet and, in the same moment, Sherlock Holmes rose with her without looking, as if he had also judged the time passed to be sufficient. "We should hurry," he said, heading for the stairs again.

She nearly told him it was a useless reminder, that she knew precisely how dangerous this was, how much haste was necessary, but she didn't, not when she realized his hand had never let go of its grip on her wrist. She simply fell into step beside him in silence.

They doubled back, but their pursuers did not follow, and when they neared the alley where they'd first entered, Irene pulled the scarf covering her hair higher, letting the shadow obscure her features even more. "Their car, I think," she said. "Harder for them to follow if we take their transportation."

A flash of white teeth as the briefest smile crossed his face, and he nodded, gesturing to the rifle still slung over her shoulder. "Doubt they'd have moved the man you shot into the back. Not enough time. Give me the rifle, I'll cover you."

She raised an eyebrow and pulled the weapon over her shoulder. "Not going to insist you drive this time?"

He reached over and snagged the strap with one hand, gesturing towards the still, albeit dimly, lit petrol station. "You're quicker, easier to miss," he answered matter-of-factly. "I can weigh the advantages as well as you can, Woman."

She grinned briefly, and pressed herself against the wall of the alley, creeping forward. When she was within arm's length of the exit to the alley, she looked back at him, nearly invisible against the shadows of the alley, the rifle in his hands, and met his eye with a brief nod. Without another word, she crept out of the alley and he flowed like a wraith into her place.

Keeping the stolen jeep between herself and the injured former military man, who had been propped up by his comrade in arms against the rear tire, Irene crept towards the other vehicle. The doors were unlocked, the passenger side still slightly ajar and nearer, and she made for it, every step silent on the sandy pavement.

It took what felt like an eternity for Irene to cross the handful of meters of the petrol station, to creep towards their pursuers' lorry and slip in through the passenger side door. As she pulled herself in, the worn springs of the seat squeaked in protest, and she froze. But silence remained and she pulled herself into the driver's seat, sighing in silent relief upon seeing the keys still in the ignition. She looked over at the alley, and, despite the fact that the darkness hid any detail, she suspected he was watching.

Irene held her breath, knowing that as soon as she turned the key, the still injured man, looking dazed but somewhat conscious in the rearview mirror with his weapon cradled in his arm, would be alerted to her presence. She twisted the key, and the lorry roared to life with a grumble, and the injured man jerked in surprise. Before he could react much further, she threw the lorry into drive and made for the alley, turning the wheel hard to present the still-unlatched passenger side to the man she knew kept watch in the shadows.

Sherlock seemed to have expected the move, catching the open door and diving in without hesitation. He slammed it shut, then propped the rifle along the small window in the back of the cab. "Keep your head down and drive," he snapped, too late, as she had already hunched down, keeping her profile as small a target as possible.

"Keep your aim steady," she snapped back, flooring the accelerator as the injured man shouted. The staccato burst of gunfire proved that he had at least recovered his senses from the surprise. The fact that the burst had gone wide meant he had not recovered his sense of aim. And with the lorry gaining acceleration, Irene was certain he wouldn't.

Still, the consulting detective at her side kept the rifle propped against the back window, sighting along the barrel, until they left the lights of Bahawalpur behind.


	6. Chapter 6

**Twenty kilometers outside Lahore**

The militiamen's lorry offered a bit more security, a bit more comfort, than the open aired jeep, though the short distance to Lahore made that particular convenience less obvious. Still, Irene did not deny that her grip on the steering wheel had loosened after they'd left Bahawalpur behind, after Sherlock Holmes had eased the rifle from its position braced at the cab window and declared that they were not being immediately followed.

The suspension on the lorry, however, were no better, though the growing quality of the road lessened the vehicle's bouncing along the road as they drove, the squeak of rusted seat springs the only thing that broke the silence. The kilometers ticked by, and the edges of Lahore began to appear on the horizon before he spoke, "The spider thinks you're dead. Mycroft wishes his marginally secret service were half as good as you. He would see the logic in it if you offered. That the best spy is the one nobody expects, and nobody expects the dead to walk."

At the edge of her field of vision, Irene saw him shift, saw him rouse himself to look at her, to watch her profile in reaction to his words.

Irene didn't turn to look at him, kept her eyes firmly focused on the road. "I told you once, that I made my way in the world. I did well enough for myself, well, until recently." She gave him the barest of glances at that, though her next words made it clear she wasn't referring directly to him. "I know how changeable Jim Moriarty's affections are, and I doubt your brother's would be much different. I don't plan to make my way on his sufferance either."

A look of profound offense crossed his expression, then just as quickly faded back to neutrality. He looked over at her once more, as if to ensure she wasn't watching him, then turned to look out the window, something like respect warring with that earlier offense in his eyes.


	7. Chapter 7

**Lahore, Pakistan**

It became painfully obvious as they approached Lahore, as the hustle and bustle of city life surrounded them, that while Irene had taken advantage of their momentary stop in Hyderabad to sleep deeply, one Sherlock Holmes had taken no such advantage, and was currently turning about fitfully in the passenger seat, one moment falling into slumber, the next jerking awake with a borderline nonsensical deduction.

"You're starting to make a scene," Irene remarked as he jerked awake a third time, his elbow thumping against the window. Traffic was slow for the moment, and his motion made the occupants of the car next to them eye them suspiciously. "And what exactly is 'Zbreth turnups on his jeans' supposed to mean?"

Her companion rubbed at his eyes as if to rub sleep physically from them, a futile gesture given how often he'd done precisely that in the last hour. "Doesn't matter," he said stubbornly, pulling himself back to a mostly alert sitting position. "Pull over at the next exit. Let me drive."

She scoffed in response and gave him a deeply skeptical look. "Do you _really_ think I'd let you take the wheel in that state?" she asked. "I'd prefer not ending up in the river because you can't stay conscious, Mr. Holmes."

He waved a dismissive hand. "You can't drive much longer without starting to experience limited mobility," he retorted. "Not with the cut in your side or the fractured rib. Obvious that you've been favouring one side, that your breathing's been shallow. I chalked it up to exertion in Bahawalpur, but two hours is a bit much for physical exertion. You're avoiding deep breaths because it's uncomfortable. The cut would explain the favouring one side, but a cracked rib would make more sense with the breathing. The former I've seen, but the latter's obvious." Annoyance crossed her face, and that earned her a smug twist of the lips.

“No more obvious than your exhaustion,” came her immediate rebuttal, though she pointedly ignored his deduction, “And my physical discomfort will hardly get you killed. You can't guarantee the inverse.” The traffic crawled ahead, but Irene made no move to make for the next exit. Still, she had to admit he was right, that the exertion of their escape from law enforcement in Bahawalpur had pulled tight on her slow-healing wounds.

They moved ahead another three car lengths in silence, and she waited for him to doze off again. The durations of his dozes had grown longer, attesting to his continued exhausted state, and at this rate Irene expected by the next or the one after he'd be out long enough for her to take the stolen lorry to a quiet hotel in the city.

As if in direct contradiction to her predictions, he remained awake, staring off into the middle distance, his eyes at once unfocused, yet moving as if seeing something no one else could. Irene drove on, her lips thinning at the painfully slow progress of the traffic. Eventually, the heat and the slow crawl lulled him back into a light doze, and she took the opportunity to edge towards the exit to the highway when a large sign in Urdu, Punjabi, and English caught her eye.

It took Irene little time to guide their vehicle through to the neatly groomed university campus, and as she tucked the vehicle into a parking spot, partially shaded by a pair of aggressively landscaped shrubs, she laughed quietly that university campuses around the world tended to share a few things in common. Namely, the relative anonymity of another pair of slightly unkempt individuals made no stir to those already strolling past, already lounging on the steps of the buildings. It was something she had counted on, and for a moment she left Sherlock and the lorry to take a knapsack from the handlebars of an unattended bicycle.

Without waking him, she climbed into the back of the lorry, wincing at the desert heat radiating off the metal and being grateful for her robes. There, she stretched gratefully, stifling a wince of discomfort at the way the movement pulled at her wounds, and leaving a textbook from the knapsack open in her lap. To any passerby, she appeared to be yet another of the university's students, having drifted off in the heat of the day during her studies.

 

_The ground was warm beneath her shoes, the brick sun-baked during the day, and now at night releasing the heat it had stored up back into the empty night. If she were a fanciful sort, Irene would have said the heat shimmered and warped the air, distorting the city such that streets she had identified during the day no longer looked familiar. But she was not a fanciful sort, instead rushing through the unfamiliar streets, trying to match unfamiliar landmarks to the map she had committed to memory._

_But Karachi was not London, its streets without familiar touchstones to ground Irene, and she found herself hurrying, trying to find the house her contact had given her, the house with the green shutters and the half-dead fern in the second story window... Despite her best efforts, worry began to creep in, hairline fissures in her mask of calm, fear creeping sour and insidious up her spine as she circled the foreign streets. No, not there, those shutters were blue, not green. And she was certain she'd seen the building with the boarded up second floor window twice before. She hurried, and as she turned another corner, Irene spotted it, the house with the green shutters, nearly black in the low light, and the potted fern, half dead in a garish pot, above. She headed for it, and glanced up and down the street before knocking._

_Three cool, sharp raps, her hand steady, refusing to betray her unlike her stomach twisting into knots, unlike her heart racin_ _g. She had lost everything, her mobile, her secrets, her protection, but she would not lose her pride, will not give in to fear._

 _There was silence after her knocks, no murmurs behind the door, no shuffling, no steps, none of the noises one would have expected, and the growing fear turned to cold ice in her stomach. She cannot be at the wrong place, there was nowhere_ left _to go, this was her last contact..._

_The door opened on silent, well-oiled hinges, and the ice that was threatening to choke her with panic ebbs, sublimated, as a veiled woman appeared in the dark, the whites of her eyes all but gleaming in the dark. She studied Irene, eyes flickering, considering, and jerks her head in a curt, silent nod inward as she opens the door wide enough to let her in. Irene relaxed, letting out a breath she did not realize she had been holding, and stepped into the house. The door shut, silent, cutting off the faint moonlight from the desert sky beyond the walls, but she simply thought it caution, to seal the house again before striking a light, that her initial relief at having found the location her contact had given her overwrote the instincts that had kept her alive the past few months._

_And that was when they descended._

_Calloused fingers gripped her arms, and a hand thick with the residue of sour sweat clapped over her mouth. Irene bit, tried to scream but there were too many, three at least besides the ones holding her down, one who favoured his left hand, who drove his fist into her side, drove the breath from her lungs until she doubled over. Another, smelling of goat, threw a similarly goat-scented sack over her head, pulled the cord tight around her throat, sealing her into the dark._

_They spoke harshly, in rough Urdu, and she managed to catch words such as 'bounty' and 'woman' and one that stops her heart cold:_ Moriarty.

_Fear returned, but instead of a simple chill down her spine, a simple slip of ice in the pit of her stomach, this time it was as if every drop of blood in her body, every nerve had been replaced by ice water. With one single word, Irene's captors had confirmed what she knew but refused to acknowledge she was running from. That while she might have been clever enough to play the Holmes boys regardless of Moriarty's 'advice', that without the weight of her secrets, without her resources to buy her way, there was little standing between her and Jim Moriarty's extensive web except her prodigious wits._

_And now she had proof that no matter how prodigious her wits, how superior her intellect, there was little they could do against Moriarty's nigh inexhaustible resources._

_Her captors let go as she struggled to breathe, and Irene felt herself fall, felt her knees hit the ground, rough stone biting through the fabric of her robes and into her skin. She curled up instinctively, swallowed the pain, but that seemed to only spur her captors on, and a particularly vicious boot caught her in the ribs hard enough that Irene thought she might black out._

_Certain fear flooded her, not for the pain that was promised to come because pain was physical, something to be leveraged when necessary and pushed away, dissociated from when not. Fear flooded her of the proof of what her capture had already shown. That her intellect had not been able to solve this problem, that despite her every effort, she had lost control._

_And what a galling, cold fear that was to someone as used to control as Irene Adler_ _. Whose control of the world around her, of her spheres of influence was—no,_ had been– _as omnipresent as the air she breathed._

 

The desert sun was warm, and despite the shade of her robes, when Irene jerked back to consciousness, she felt nothing but the grave chill of her dream, the memory of her capture at the hands of Moriarty's hired guns. The textbook she had left open on her lap as a disguise clattered to the metal bed of the truck, further shaking Irene awake. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath before opening her eyes, reminding herself that she felt sun on her skin, that the darkness was a lingering dream and that she was _safe_. Or as safe as death could make her.

The phantom cold of fear still lingered despite her best efforts to remind herself where she was, and Irene rose from the truck bed and climbed down, wincing to herself as her uncovered hand touched hot metal. The pain helped, heat a reminder against the cold, physical discomfort to banish the chains of the mental. She spared a glance for the cab, but did little more than reassure herself that Sherlock Holmes was still within, before she ventured further, just across the small parking lot to a small courtyard flanked by buildings.

The university's students paid little mind to her, dismissing her as just another student, taking a moment from her studies, and Irene forced herself to breathe, to catalog the scents in the air, the texture of the cloth beneath her fingertips and the feel of the ground beneath her feet. Hot desert air, a hint of smoke, of cigarettes and a student wearing an illicit perfume. Thick broadcloth, scratchy along raw edges, taken for its ability to conceal rather than comfort. The crunch of gravel and sand mixed with the crisping grass under her feet. Each reminder, each data point, grounded her to reality, and out of her dream.

“You lied to me.”

She had been so focused on categorizing the footprints left behind by students in the dying grass that she had not heard the footsteps behind her. Or, potentially, he had meant to surprise her, had concealed his approach. Either way, Irene had not expected his approach, and jerked up in surprise, spinning around to face Sherlock before she'd even schooled the surprise from her face.

“Not at all. You were simply incapable of objecting when I made the decision to stop,” she retorted. She heard the sharpness of her own voice in her ears, the slip that revealed just how out of sorts she was. She drew the dominatrix's armour back around herself, stomped down the scars and the hollow terror, and smoothed her expression back to cold haughtiness in the desert sun, facing off toe to toe with a slightly more rested and distinctly more irritated Sherlock Holmes.

His frown grew, and Irene took solace in it, in the familiarity of disagreeing with him. “I told you any delay would increase our likelihood of being discovered, Woman,” he snapped at her, no longer advancing but obviously attempting to use his height as an advantage, to loom disapprovingly. “And you brought us to a park full of people!”

“A university, where an unfamiliar face is dismissed as simply another student, another professor,” she retorted. She gestured to their stolen vehicle, hearing the sharpness recede from her voice as she embraced the familiar. She headed for it, brushing past him with a brittle, angry disregard, leaving behind her brief vulnerability, her momentary fear. “But if you are so concerned, I suggest we leave at once.” Over her shoulder, she added, “You may drive.”


	8. Chapter 8

**One hundred sixty one kilometers outside Islamabad**

She stared out over the landscape, seeing the desert scrub dotted orange hills rise up, their shadows mercurial beneath the swift passing clouds and the more stately play of the sun. She stared out over the landscape, knowing that with every kilometer they were one step closer to Islamabad, one step closer to the death of Irene Adler. “Jim Moriarty isn't stupid,” she eventually said, her attention still directed firmly outside. “Neither is your brother. They'll work out what happened in Karachi.”

The desert rolled by, the man in the seat beside her driving in silence, for so long that Irene did not expect an answer. But he spoke eventually, conviction in every word. “No they won't.” She turned to look at him, and he continued, “I have the digital footage from the cameraman. A woman died earlier that night during the execution. She was your build, your colouring. American. Someone the terrorists snatched based solely on Moriarty's descriptions of you, no doubt. The camera footage will be intercepted on a damaged thumb drive. They'll be lucky to pull enough data off of it to reconstruct the first half of the video with your face. It'll be enough to convince Moriarty, since he knew they had you in their possession. It'll be enough to bring Mycroft to Pakistan. He'll see the body of the other victim, and take samples back for testing.”

He glanced over at her, a smirk touching his lips. “Not that he'd trust the DNA testing. You've made him mistrust anything coming out of their labs, Woman. Not many people can.”

She didn't smirk back, instead drawing her knees up to her chest, heedless of the fact that her position made the seatbelt dig into her abdomen. “He'll have kept samples, I expect. Collected from my flat in Belgravia.” A twist of her lip. “Other places. Samples he thinks he can trust the provenience of. He'll test the samples against them, even if he doesn't trust them.”

“You knew the recordkeeper,” he reminded her. “It'd be hardly difficult to change the results.”

The sun glittered against a rock formation out in the far distance. “He might be on the lookout for that trick,” she objected. “He wouldn't do the tests himself, would he?”

Sherlock scoffed at that. “My brother? Run a DNA sequencing test?” he echoed. “He'd rather be on a diet. He'll have it sent to a lab or three, independently.”

Irene reached up, curled her fingers around a lock of her hair, dark and mussed and tangled from days on the road, and considered it with an expression that mirrored one of John Watson's descriptions of Sherlock. Brooding intensity. “You already plan to have the courier carrying the video intercepted,” she mused. “It would hardly be difficult to have the samples your brother plans to have sent to labs swapped with different ones. Ones that would absolutely match the ones he already knows are mine. Ones with trace evidence of Pakistan's mineral and flora on them.”

Silence stretched between them as the implication of her suggestion sank in, and, though Irene kept her attention firmly on the road ahead, on the landscape beyond, she could tell that he was considering it, rolling the idea around in his head, examining it from all angles. She had done the same, after all. “It would be unexpected enough that he'd overlook the anomalies,” he agreed. “The traces that are not native to Karachi. Pollen from Lahore, gunpowder. Or convince himself those came from before your capture. Or during your interrogation.”

A nod, and a small smile played out on her face as she turned her attention to him. “It would work, Mr. Holmes. Admit it.”

He said nothing in response, but a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth nonetheless.


	9. Chapter 9

**Islamabad, Pakistan**

The rainstorm came on suddenly. One minute the air seemed to waver with heavy desert heat rising from the sun-baked city, and the next the heavens opened, raindrops pounding like a thousand eager heartbeats against the hotel's glass windows. The proprietor assured them that it was normal for this time of year, that rainstorms swept through the desert city like a fury and would soon be gone again.

The reassurance did little to sway either Sherlock or Irene. It did, however, provide a reason to remain in the small hotel room Sherlock had begun renting a week ago, rather than braving the city, hidden in anonymity, to seek out disguises and new names before her flight to Argentina (booked for one Elizabeth Rochester) and his to London in the morning.

She stood in front of the glass doors to the hotel room's balcony, watching the city through a curtain of wavering water, and resisted the urge to rest her cheek against the cool glass. She has no intention of flying to Buenos Aires. He had booked that flight before meeting her in Karachi, which meant it was a trail that could be followed, if necessary. It would be a wisp of smoke, because anything after Argentina would be her own, but even a wisp was too much.

Irene Adler was dead, and she was not going to allow even Sherlock Holmes to have a chance of finding her ghost, for the sake of her own ruthlessly suppressed sentiment.

The question remained: America or Australia?

"The way you stand gives you away." Sherlock Holmes' voice remarked from somewhere behind her in the hotel room. She expected he was staring off into space, having thrown himself into a chair or some such.

She did not turn around, kept her gaze out into the middle distance, seeking patterns in the chaos of the falling rain. “Gives me away as what? British, upper class, used to high heels, used to being obeyed, blackmailer, dominatrix, on the run?”

The sound of rain filled the room after her question, and Irene had given up on receiving an answer when he spoke again, his voice quiet. “As Irene Adler.”

That made her turn from the window, made her look at him fully, as if she could read some small thing in his expression, something that made his answer so heavy with meaning she was not certain should be there. And when she did, she found him sitting on the hotel bed, his elbows resting on crossed knees and his fingers tenting against his lips, studying the window... no, studying _her_ with a look of intense scrutiny.

“Then it's fortunate that a flight to Argentina would require so much sitting,” she answered, crossing her arms beneath her breasts as she met his studying look with one of her own. She told herself she had no reason to study him, that there was nothing in his demeanor that was even remotely _interesting_. But that was an obvious lie, because he certainly found something to study in her standing by the window, and she had to figure out what it was.

His expression did not waver; he did not look away in the face of her scrutiny, and that very fact surprised Irene. She had flummoxed him before, but could something in the intervening months before his appearance in Karachi have changed him? She doubted it. She would have noticed in the last week, given their close quarters. “It's something to remember,” he said, still utterly serious. “I won't have my efforts wasted just because you overlooked an important part of your next disguise.”

She wanted to ask him why. Why he put forth the effort at all. But there was an obvious answer, and to ask would have been to either acknowledge that she did not know or that she wanted the obvious answer confirmed, and she could do — _would_ do— neither. Instead, she stepped away from the window and its dripping rain, towards the small table, scattered with prepared documents. Her new false name. The false name he'd used to travel to Pakistan. “You'll need samples. Hair is the most obvious,” she said, bracing her hands on the table. “Tissue? Blood? I admit to being a little too preoccupied to have observed the state of my doppelganger's remains.”

"Mycroft hates field work," Sherlock dismissed, pointedly ignoring her mention of the state of the other body. It was, after all, irrelevant. "He'll have hair samples taken from the body and blood taken from the surrounding ground. Won't dirty his hands taking tissue samples."

Irene nodded and reached up to undo the band that kept her hair pulled up. "Good. I'd hate to have to lose a finger due to your brother's thoroughness." She surveyed the room and her lips twisted into a small frown. "I'll need a syringe. And scissors." A nod towards the door. "I doubt even the accommodating hotel staff has the former in easy supply."

Sherlock snorted and unfolded himself, sweeping towards the small armoire on the opposite wall. He opened a battered backpack within the armoire and scattered a small arsenal of paraphernalia on the table atop the papers, among them syringes, a pocket knife, a small bag of a powdery white substance. "Hotels think they know addicts when they see them," he said smugly. "Foreign tourists, pay in cash, drugs in their luggage, requests for privacy. The proprietors don't clean their rooms until they check out because they don't want to find drugs and have to report them. Might as well be invisible."

Her obvious momentary surprise made him preen, and Irene forced herself to pick up the bag of cocaine, scrutinizing it in the dim light. "Any traces found on the samples will be explained away by the terrorists' drug trafficking, I presume."

Another snort, though his expression was pleased at her answer. "Yes, even if it's obvious their trade was primarily in heroin. They'll assume the drugs were either the terrorists'..." a pause, "...or yours.  It'd suit Mycroft's ego, to think you've turned to drugs to cope with your defeat."

Irene's face twisted in disgust as she took the bag with her into the small washroom, dumping the contents down the drain, shaking it to empty as much of the drug out of its plastic crevices as possible. "How painfully ordinary," she sneered, running water briefly to scrub any of the drug clinging to her fingers before returning to the room.

"You're hardly ordinary," he agreed calmly, not looking up at her return, instead picking up the syringe from the table. Irene arched an eyebrow at his agreement, but he pointedly refused to look at her, instead nodding at the pocket knife. "A few inches should be enough. Base of the neck. That area should be most protected from the elements, least likely to have picked up stray contaminants from our trip."

"Are you trying to goad me into preferring it when you never answered my texts?" she asked tartly, trading the knife for the small bag. She curled a few inches of hair from the base of her neck around her finger and sawed through it with the pocket knife. The curls went into the bag, and Irene sealed it with a careful fingertip.

"Why should I?" he replied. "You'll never hear from me again after tomorrow, Woman." The words seemed to hang in the air between them. Their mutual knowledge, previously held in unspoken suspension, now catalyzed by his words, forcing the knowledge to precipitate out, to be acknowledged.

Silence stretched. Fifteen, twenty, thirty seconds, before Irene pushed her hair back behind her shoulders and gestured for the syringe in his hand. "I could use some assistance, Mr. Holmes," she said quietly. "I don't have the steadiest hand for self-inflicted wounds."

He looked up at that, met her eyes, and there was something almost stunned in his expression, something almost uncertain, a fissure in the consulting detective's facade. Wordlessly, he nodded, and reached for her arm. Irene made a move to roll up the long black sleeve, but he reached for it instead, rolling the sleeve up past her elbow, tucking it back with a deft finger. He paused then and studied her arm for a moment, before setting the syringe back and reaching into his battered bag for a small first aid kit. Irene watched in fascination as he used a sterile wipe to clean off the needle, then drew another across her arm, the kiss of rubbing alcohol cool against her skin.

It didn't surprise her that he knew exactly how to insert the needle; he was an addictive personality, that much had been obvious from first glance and subsequent glances had simply reinforced the fact. Still, Irene drew in a sharp breath as the needle broke skin, and watched as dark blood slowly filled the syringe. He worked in utter silence, drawing the needle back out with little more than a sudden cessation of pressure, wiping the spot with the alcohol swab again.

“If it was the end of the world, if this was the very last night...” His voice was so low that Irene wasn't at all certain if she'd heard him at all, or if she were simply remembering another night, another intimate touch, her mind merely echoing her own words back to herself. But his thumb lingered against her skin, tracing over the small needle wound, and Irene felt her heartbeat quicken involuntarily as he looked up from where his fingers lingered, his eyes dark and dilated, his earlier uncertainty falling away to something more determined, more fragile. “Would you have dinner with me?”

She wanted to step away, to break the fragile touch of his thumb against the inside of her elbow, a last stray drop of blood beading against her skin. She wanted to step away, but could not, not tonight, not in this hotel room trapped by the desert rainstorm outside, not caught by the knowledge that had precipitated out of their words.

“It  _ is _ the end of the world, Mr. Holmes,” she reminded him, meeting his eye, her own as dark and bright and hesitantly determined as his. She took a step, not out of the fragile bubble but into it, stepping close to touch her lips to his with a surety of motion that was unlike her usual, calculated brazen sexuality. “The very last night Irene Adler will ever have.”

 

He tasted of desert dust and bitter ash, of stale cigarettes and the sweat of the road, of their week crossing Pakistan. And for a moment, Irene expected him to pull away, to realize the sentiment inherent in his words, her words, and to wall it away as she should. But rather than pulling away or responding with the frenzied need of their last spontaneous kiss, he responded with the same deliberation with which she closed the distance between them. His lips yielded for a heartbeat beneath hers before he began to explore, to deepen the kiss, his mouth urging hers open, to taste deeper and to draw her breath into himself.

She responded in kind, her hand moving to rest against his chest, feeling the beat of his heart steadily picking up speed against her palm as she met his exploration with her own, feeling his hand slide up her arm to rest against her shoulder. It was not as if a dam had burst, not as if they were frenzied or their bodies and brains flooded with endorphins that drove them to biological need. There was a deliberation here in their touches, in lips against lips, in the taste of salt against her tongue, in the way his hand rested against her hip and the way her hand wound around his shoulder.

This was not spontaneous; they had spent their spontaneity in a single kiss on a Karachi battlefield. This was a reckoning long in coming, the culmination of a chess game that began the moment he'd stepped into her flat in Belgravia, that should have ended the moment she stepped into a darkened 747 jumbo jet full of bodies, that should have ended in London, that should have ended in Karachi, but that would not end until a rain drenched night in Islamabad.

His exploration of her mouth grew bolder, delving deep as if to taste the passage of every secret that had ever left her lips, and she in turn pulled away the layers of clothing that covered him, pushing away the sand-flecked robe that had been his disguise, letting it fall to the ground in a small sighing cloud of desert dust. Having removed one layer, she inched his shirt up his chest, broke the kiss long enough to pull it over his head, and pressed her palm to his sternum, her fingertips resting in the hollow of his throat, the same spot where she had nearly touched him the first time when she'd pulled the priest's false collar from his neck.

Her touch on his bare skin seemed to galvanize Sherlock, or perhaps he simply took it as permission, and his hand on her hip became grasping, focused as his fingers tangled in the dark cloth, pushing it upwards over her hips. His gaze remained on her face as he did, never once looking down to see what rested hidden beneath the robe that had kept out much of the desert sand and sun in the past week. It was fitting, and Irene did not break his gaze even as he pushed the robe up past the injury on her right side, even as she drew in a sharp breath at the jolt of pain brought on by unexpected pressure. She refused to back down as he refused to step away. She stepped closer as he tried to pull the robe over her arms, over her shoulder, and kissed him again, a single bite to his lower lip, her smile widening when she felt him jump beneath her at the touch.

She pulled away again, palm no longer against his chest as she tugged the robe over her head, left it in the same pile as his. She stepped towards the bed and he moved with her, his hand back at her hip, pushing up the shirt she wore and running his long fingers along the skin just underneath her waistband. There did not need to be words for them to communicate, not in this moment, in the endgame of their particular emotional calculus. It was enough that he had echoed back to her invitation, that she had accepted it with a deliberate kiss.

She led and he followed to the adequately comfortable hotel bed, where he divested her of her trousers and she of his, where they tangled, pale limbs made luminous in the rain-drenched moonlight of Irene Adler's last night on earth. She was the master and he the student, though it took him little time enough to figure out where on the soft swell of her breasts that a kiss applied would earn him the favour of her gasp, where the light touch of her fingernails would make him hiss and shudder with mounting pleasure. He had her on her back, staring down at her with eyes that never forgot, that memorized the play of light on her hair as it curled against the sheets, memorized the way her skin felt beneath his skin, the way she gasped and the way he avoided the long healing wounds and bruises scattered across her body. In hindsight he would realize that she allowed it, that she allowed him to have her this way, guiding him when he fumbled, wrapping her long legs around his waist, guiding his lips and tongue to the pulse points and nerve clusters that gave her the most pleasure even as his orgasm washed over him in premature but rapid, knee-weakening succession.

With his heartbeat racing, pounding, he wondered if one apologized after such a performance, then in the next beat decided he had nothing to apologize for, that the Woman knew, that she had so accurately once mocked him, cold and implacable, her words as much pain as the lines her nails had drawn down his back, as _the Virgin_. She, for her part, did not seem to find anything amiss, simply drew him back down to the bed with a languorous, heavy-lidded look in her eyes.

A week of travel, of desert sand and dirt roads and dodging bullets, and she drew him with her down to sleep, to rest aching bodies and too-full minds before the dawn broke.

 

They slept tangled in each other out of exhaustion, not sentiment, the deep sleep of the weary, and woke again, sometime before dawn, when the rain stopped, the silence suddenly loud in the absence of striking droplets. They woke, and this time she took him, her hands running along every inch of him, biting into his flesh with nails like razorblades and fingertips like velvet. She shed every stitch of clothing then and his fingers ran along her scars and her curves, memorizing purpling bruises and milky skin, trailing paths against her hips and her bandages. She eased him back to the bed, coaxed his body to life and made every inch of him _ache_ before she mounted him. She drove him relentlessly to the edge of orgasm then stilled, waited for him to be tension taut like a violin string before she made him follow her lead, brought her to quivering pleasure, before she drove him again to the edge.

He quivered and arched, pressing kisses against her skin until she gasped, his own body craving the release she denied him again and again, until he moaned, begged, and she purred in satisfaction. He would remember it, the single word she spoke, no, _demanded_ , velvet and steel in her voice even as his fingers tugged at her breasts and she gasped at the sensation, “ _Again_.”

And his own guttural, wanting obedience. “ _Please_.”

She cried out then, falling against him as her body clenched and shuddered against his, her dark hair falling like a curtain around them, as she rode out her pleasure and he was certain he cried out in response, his own orgasm crashing over him at the feel of her body milking his. Pleasure, made all the more intense by forced delay. He was uncertain what he cried out, whether or not either of them called out each other's names, but there would be no revisiting this night in his mind; no matter how ingrained it has already been in his mind palace, he would not relive it to find out. She had her own suspicions, but would never indulge them, would shield herself from the chance of chemical weakness.

When she came fully back to herself, aching with pleasant soreness, she untangled her fingers from his hair, slid back against the bed, and closed her eyes, listening as his breathing changed from rapid ragged breaths to deep slumber again. She smiled, and waited.

 

When he woke again, the sun was up, spilling bright hot sunshine into the hotel room. The bedclothes next to him were cold, had been cold for hours, it would seem. The room remained as he remembered it, though three things were conspicuously missing. The travel papers he had prepared for the Woman, his clothes, and the Woman herself.

Sherlock Holmes sat up, untangled himself from now-cold hotel sheets, and smiled faintly as he looked around the room. A part of him had already known, even when he drifted back off to sleep, exhausted and utterly satisfied, that she would not be here when he awoke. That she'd have disappeared into death, but still out there in Buenos Aires and wherever her whims took her after that, the one woman who mattered.

He stood and reached for his mobile, knowing there would be nothing there, no new messages, no hints, no clues. Simply the Woman's last words.

_Goodbye, Mr. Holmes._


End file.
